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About SouthernGirl2

A Native Texan who adores baby kittens, loves horses, rodeos, pomegranates, & collect Eagles.
Enjoys politics, games shows, & dancing to all types of music. Loves discussing and learning about different cultures.
A Phi Theta Kappa lifetime member with a passion for Social & Civil Justice.

The director told an audience at the Cannes Film Festival that he’d like to release a four-hour miniseries of his hit spaghetti Western, USA Today reports. The 2012 pic earned him an Oscar for best original screenplay.

“My idea, frankly, is to cut together a four-hour version of ‘Django Unchained,’” he said on Friday. “But I wouldn’t show it like a four-hour movie. I would cut it up into hour chapters. Like a four-part miniseries. And show it on cable television. Show it like an hour at a time, each chapter.”

The exploitation comedy is 2 hours and 45 minutes long, but many scenes, including extra footage of Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), fell on the cutting room floor.

‘X-Men’ Rules World With Massive $261 Million Global Box-Office Opening

12 hours ago

“X-Men: Days of Future Past” steamrolled the competition on its way to an estimated $90.7 million three-day Memorial Day weekend haul in North America, and added a huge $171 million from overseas for a whopping $261 million first weekend globally.
Fox’s Marvel Comics-based mutant mashup still has Monday to go, and should wind up with around $107 million domestically over the long holiday weekend.

Being Mistaken For Kitchen Help Just Made This Exec More Outspoken
The Huffington Post | by Cate Matthews

Posted: 05/23/2014 11:35 am EDT

Eight years ago, aspiring senator Harold Ford called investment firm president Mellody Hobson up to ask for help getting press coverage for the upcoming election.

For someone as accomplished as Hobson, this was no problem. She set up a lunch with the editorial board of a major New York media company, which was a huge opportunity for Ford, but things didn’t go quite as she was expecting.

When she and Ford arrived at the company’s office, they informed the receptionist that they were there for the lunch. After ushering them through a series of corridors, the receptionist turned to the two, both dressed to impress, and asked, “Where are your uniforms?”

Ford and Hobson, one a Tennessee state representative, the other a Princeton-educated business executive, had been mistaken for kitchen help.

“Imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation like Exxon Mobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black. You would think that was weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company and everyone around the table was a white male, when will it be that we think that’s weird too?”

Hobson coupled her story with similarly unsettling statistics about minority representation in corporate America. Thousands of companies are currently publicly traded on the market, but only two are chaired by black women. Hobson is one of those women, and she is speaking out.

Hobson acknowledges that talking about race is “like touching the third rail,” but argues that it’s necessary to foster change. She overcame her own fears to help address it and the resulting talk, embedded above, is well worth the watch.

Reginald Wayne Miller, the president of Cathedral Bible College, was arrested Thursday on accusations that he forces foreign students at his school to work long hours for low wages and then threatens to revoke their student visas if they complain or fail to comply with his demands.

The 65-year-old Miller — whose school recently moved from the former Myrtle Beach Air Force Base to Marion, where Miller now lives — was booked into the Florence County Detention Center shortly after 2 a.m. on Thursday.

Race Manners: We’re unlikely to get real data on this ashiness-inspired topic. But there’s something fascinating about race-related differences that make us ask each other, “For what?!”

By: Jenée Desmond-Harris
Posted: May 21 2014 3:00 AM

Dear Race Manners:

Genuine question: Is lotion a black thing (especially for guys)? A random white dude at the gym asked me why I use all these “products” (basically face lotion and body lotion). I asked, “Don’t you use lotion?” He said, “For what!?” I know lotion is marketed mostly to women (if advertising is correct), but I just remember from the time I was young, my mom would scold me if I tried to walk out the door with ashy knees.

Do white people get ashy knees? Or is the invisibility of dry skin a light-skin privilege? And furthermore (here is the academic side to this), I’m now wondering about how race and gender intersect to produce different grooming practices for men of color that do not fit white constructions of masculinity. —Confused about Creams, Color and Culture

This is a fun question, because discussions of perceived racial differences that are completely free of any serious implications are so rare. We’re not talking about health disparities or education or practices related to child rearing, or even dress or hair (which are seemingly superficial but can actually have their own consequences when it comes to how we judge each other).

It’s just lotion.

So your inquiry falls into the category of things like the (made-up?) racial washcloth divide. And black-vs.-white (or are they regional?) preferences for pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie. On topics like these, opinions are passionate, if totally anecdotal, but the consequences don’t run very deep.

The flip side of that point is that few people are likely to attempt any serious inquiry into the question, “Is lotion a black thing?”

I did stumble upon a study whose content seems to support your hunch that, while we’re all at risk for parched skin, it simply shows a lot more on darker complexions than on lighter ones: “In people with darkly pigmented skin, classified as Fitzpatrick type IV, V, or VI skin, xerosis or dry skin can be associated with a whitish coloring and a reduction in skin shininess known as ‘ashiness.’”

A contemporary view of W.E.B. Du Bois’ double consciousness is revisited with a perspective from writer Ralph Ellison.

By: Greg Thomas
Posted: May 23 2014 3:00 AM

Theodore R. Johnson is a writer and naval officer who describes himself as an “upper-middle-class black male.” He recently claimed in The Atlantic that an unintended consequence of a burgeoning group of “college-educated, middle-class black folks”—whom W.E.B. Du Bois called the Talented Tenth—has been their break from the wider black community while still not being accepted by the white majority. To Johnson, this plight is a bleak, no-man’s-land.

“How does it feel to be a solution? It feels like social carpetbagging, always code-switching to blend in with whichever environ we happen to be in. This is more than just a social survival skill; it’s become a matter of identity. There is no turning it off, only tuning the rheostat. We will never completely fit in America, and will always be confronted by preconceived notions. Du Bois charged us with relieving the burdens of ‘an historic race, in the name of this the land of their fathers’ fathers, and in the name of human opportunity.’ Yet, we are an exercise in insufficiency.”

Johnson encases his lonely statement of betwixt-and-between-ness in a concept used by Du Bois in 1897: double consciousness. Johnson recalls being teased as an “Oreo” by black folks bused in from the “other side of town.” Plus he was called “a raisin in a bowl of milk” in honors classes as well as in the suburban area in which he was raised.

If he says that was his experience, I’ll take him at his word. Yet Du Bois’ description was based on the legal, material and social restrictions imposed by the “gaze” of white supremacy. Johnson’s updated version, instead, involves an insecure feeling of tacit rejection by fellow blacks as well as whites, and psychic angst arising from a belief that you don’t fit anywhere.

Shanesha Taylor of Phoenix can now see her 8-month-old and 2-year-old sons under supervision.

By: Lynette Holloway
Posted: May 24 2014 10:26 AM

A homeless woman who left her children in a car during a job interview in Scottsdale, Ariz., can now have supervised visits with them, the Arizona Republic reports.

Commissioner Richard Nothwehr ruled Thursday that the woman, Shanesha Taylor, 35, of Phoenix, could have supervised visits with her 8-month-old and 2-year-old sons, the report says.

She had been prohibited from seeing them after she was arrested in March in Scottsdale on two felony counts of child abuse after police say she left the children in a hot car for 45 minutes while she went on a job interview. She pleaded not guilty to the charges, and the children have been with relatives and under the supervision of the Division of Child and Family Services.

“This is a big victory for the defense,” attorney Benjamin Taylor said, according to the Arizona Republic. “My client is looking forward to seeing her kids once again.”

It is not clear which reservation Obama plans to visit, but his senior policy advisor for Native American Affairs, Jodi Gillette, is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota. Her brother is the chairman there as well.

Carson continues to lie. He’s a medical professional and knows better than this:

“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider,” Carson said on Fox News, using the veterans hospital backlogs to criticize Obamacare. “And if we can’t get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world are you going to do it with the entire population?”

There are 21 million veterans in this country. They are the 2nd largest single ‘insurer’ after Medicare, and treat more people than any other health provider in the country – and not just in this country, there are VA offices and hospitals outside the US as well. It’s a compound lie – one to diminish what the VA does and one to diminish the GOPs role in creating so many veterans in need of so much care. That’s more people than live in NY State.

How Obamacare could change three Senate races — for both Democrats and Republicans

By Jason Millman
May 23 at 10:22 am

While Obamacare politics have recently cooled on the Hill — and the relative ease of the confirmation hearings of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is proof of that — the president’s health-care law will still be a big issue in the midterm elections with control of the Senate at stake.

This is the third election cycle since the Affordable Care Act was passed, and both the Republican and Democratic Senate campaign arms say the races will be settled on much more than Obamacare. But Republicans are counting on the law being a drag for Democrats, while Democrats see Republicans moving onto other topics.

“That’s not to say the issue will not be a factor and could become a bigger factor as the implementation continues, but right now we are at a moment where the significance is waning,” said Matt Canter, deputy executive director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Bob Blendon, a Harvard University expert on public opinion toward health policy, told me that Obamacare is especially unpopular in the states with 12 competitive Senate races identified by Charlie Cook. “Republicans will be running negative against it because the public opinion is not anywhere as positive as it is national, where it isn’t terrific,” Blendon said.

There are some Senate races, though, where the politics of Obamacare are a little more complicated.

How the NRA Enables Massacres
As a shooting spree leaves seven dead in California, the gun lobby is trying to thwart attempts to study gun deaths and officials who see gun violence as a public health crisis.

Yet another massacre occurred last night at an institution of learning, this time the University of California, Santa Barbara. The price we paid for the National Rifle Association’s “freedom” was seven people murdered and seven injured at nine different crime scenes.

A young man who Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown called “severely mentally disturbed” drove by various student hangouts to commit an act of “premeditated mass murder” apparently—according to videos posted to YouTube and threats made to women on campus—due to his anger at being “rejected” by women on campus.

………………………….

But this past week we’ve seen the other side of the coin. How the NRA works to suppress information that would lead to treating a public health catastrophe that claims over 30,000 lives per year and injures over 100,000 as that very thing, while fighting to ensure we have as little access to information as possible that might help save lives.

The simple fact is, much like with their friends on the right from the tobacco industry to the oil industry to the megachurch, science and information are the enemies of the NRA. They have proven they will do whatever it takes to make sure we have less of it, and more Santa Barbaras.

The clearest example, of course, is the NRA’s labeling a bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) to allow the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to once again use its considerable expertise to research gun violence prevention, “unethical.” Yes, they actually said that.

It’s depressing that so many red state citizens tell pollsters that they oppose ObamaCare even as they report liking their state’s health exchanges. I suppose, however, that this is an area ripe for investigation by social scientists. They can discover exactly what the effect of the Republicans’ disinformation effort is on the populace by comparing those who oppose ObamaCare to those who support what ObamaCare actually does. It has long been noticed that most of the individual components of ObamaCare poll significantly better than the law as a whole, but this phenomenon of people liking ObamaCare unless you call it ObamaCare is somewhat new. It’s not quite the same as the deranged tendency of Tea Partiers to ask the government to keep its paws off their Medicare, but it’s similar in kind.

I can understand that hostility to the president translates to hostility to a law bearing his name, but there is something fundamentally ridiculous about the disconnect people are demonstrating between support for the law’s provisions and opposition to the law itself.

A Madison County Justice Court judge is accused of striking a mentally challenged young man and using a racial slur.

CANTON –In an echo of Mississippi’s past, a Justice Court judge here is accused of striking a mentally challenged young man and yelling, “Run, n—–, run.”

The family has filed a complaint with police against Madison County Justice Court Judge Bill Weisenberger, who is white, alleging he struck their 20-year-old African-American son, Eric Rivers, on May 8 at the Canton Flea Market.

“This is 2014,” said former Canton Mayor William Truly, president of the Canton branch of the NAACP, “not 1960, where someone could slap a young man and call out, ‘Run, n—–, run.”

Darlene Ballard, executive director of the state Judicial Commission, said if the allegations are true, they would “violate multiple canons” of the Judicial Code of Conduct.

Truly called on Weisenberger, a former law enforcement officer and former emergency operations director in Madison County, to step down from hearing cases until the matter is resolved — or simply to resign.

“No citizen should have to face justice before a judge who holds such a high degree of racial animus and hatred,” Truly said in a news conference Friday.

When an “Arab” or “Muslim” American kills people in mass they are a “terrorist”. When a black person shoots someone they are “thugs”. When a white man commits a mass shooting he is “mentally ill” or “sick”.

Whiteness and white privilege are the luxury to be an individual, one whose behavior reflects nothing about white people as a group.

There will be not be a national discussion of a culture of “white pathology” or how white Americans may have a “cultural problem” with their young men and gun violence. The news media will not devote extensive time to the “social problem” of white male violence and mass shootings.

Elliot Rodger, a rich, white, entitled, young man allegedly shot and killed (as he apparently hunted them down) six women while driving his BMW around Santa Barbara, California late last night. Like Adam Lanza, this would appear to be a case of aggrieved white male entitlement syndrome, one which has led to a murderous and tragic outcome.

Black Girls Rock!

Flickr Photos

Potus Takes Oath of Office

Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China

My Brothers Keeper

AFRO PUFFS

Most Adorable Shoe Stealer

Six Little Babies

Fatherhood

Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.